Tuesday, March 11, 2008

In order to teach a foreign language to children (especially preschoolers) you must be active, and constantly change the rhythm of the class.
It is convenient to force the kids to change their places, make them move (sit them on the floor, then have them work on a table, etc.). This is in order to catch their attention better, to help make you the focus of their attention.
No single teaching technique or approach is all-inclusive when teaching preschoolers, the secret lies in variety. Songs, games, puppets, role play, all contributes to create an educational, yet fun class.
The most important with preschoolers, is to make allow the subject of the class, to the degree that this is possible, to be themselves. Let them tell you about their new clothes, the party they went to, their latest cold, etc. This is because this age group (and up until they reach 10 years of age) is basically egocentric: they are the center of their own world.
One of the most important aspects of your class must be repetition and practice. You must find the way of involving their regular teachers and their parents.
When teaching a language, theory recommends avoiding the utilization of translation and bilingual texts. In practice, however, if translation or some sort of bilingual activity is all the regular teachers and parents can do, go for it without hesitation. The point is that the children have some regular exposure, any exposure, to the language, besides the few hours of your specific language lesson.
It is also important to give both parent and regular teachers adequate tools to create a "learning environment". Isolated words without a context, vocabulary lists or activities disconnected from daily life activities are in general not useful. To teach vocabulary and phrases about the park, the daily routine such as dressing, washing your teeth, set the table, are useful to create this learning environment because they are specific situation of the daily life the parents and regular teachers can refer to regularly.
I have a website about my own experience teaching a foreign language (Spanish) to preschoolers, ages ranging from 6 months to 5 years: prekspanish.com
In the website I describe my own evolution as a teacher, and give free advice on materials, teaching techniques and bibliography for foreign language teachers.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

The Greek verb Conjugation, in relation to English and Spanish


A word can vary, especially in its endings, for a number of reasons.

In English, number is the most evident. For example, "horse" differs from "horses" because one is singular and the other plural. In grammatical terms we would say that number is an accident of English words, that is, a characteristic that might cause a word to change its form.

Another much less frequent accident in English is gender. In general, English words don't have gender markers, but there are a few examlpes: blond, blonde. We could say, then, that gender is not a common accident for English words.

This doesn't happen in other languages, for example the Latin languages, where nominal words (substantives, adjectives) frequently have accidence in gender and number: señor, señora, señores, señoras. Moreover, adjectives, normally invariable in English, also have such accidence in Latin languages: lindo/linda/lindos/lindas.

Verbs also have accidence. They tend to vary according to number (singular or plural), and according to the "person". The person is a concept that indicates the location of the verb in realtion to the speaker.

  • The first person (I, we), is the person who speaks.
  • The second person (you singular or plural), is the person to whom one speaks.
  • The third person (he/she/it, they), is a referred person, of whom one speaks.

In modern English, verb accidents by gender and number are almost nonexistent, except for the additional "s" for regular forms of the present 3rd person singular.

Compare the accidence of English and Spanis for the present tense of the verb "to love"="amar"

I love
yo
amo
you
love

amas
heloves
él
ama
we
love
nosotros
amamos
you
love
vosotros
amáis
they
love
ellos
aman



As it can be seen, verbs Spanish and other Latin languages vary in form according to their person and number. English verbs too, but in a much smaller degree, that's why in English the use of the pronoun accompanying the verbal form is mandatory.

Another accident of verbs is, of course, the tense. "Look" is different from "looks", and this is different from "looked". Tense is, then, anothen accident of verbs.

Classic Greek has all these accidents just mentioned: tense, person and number.

There are 2 more variations of a verb that will be mentioned in this article: one is the "voice". It denotes if the subject of a verb is performing the action (i.e., being "active"), or rather suffering, experiencing the action unto himself (i.e, being "passive"). In either English or Spanish, the voice is not a real accident of the verbs, because these languages have verbs only for the active voice, while the passive voice is built by means of a verbal phrase: I love/I am loved=amo/soy amado.

But in Classic Greek the is an accident of the verb. Variations in the verb word indicate not only person, number and tense, but also voice.

For example, lúw means "I dissolve", whereas "lúomai" means "I am dissolved". The w-omai ending denotes the voice. Moreover, Greek has an intermediate voice (adequately called "middle voice"), used for reflective or intransitive actions.

Finally, Classic Greek, as well as Spanish and English, have modes or "moods", which indicate the speakers' attitude. The conditional, for example, is a mood. "I like" and "I would like" are both present, only that one is in our "normal" mood we use to say things, called "Indicative Mood", and the other is in the mood we use for conditions or possibilities, called "Conditional mood". Other moods are Subjunctive and Imperative, the mood for giving orders, request, advice.

Classic Greek has all these moods (and one more, in fact), and, again, it doesn't resort to verbal phrases but indicates the mood all in one word. For example: "ágeis" means "drive" like in "you drive" in indicative mode, whereas "áge" means "drive!" as in imperative mode.

A good collection of free examples of Classic Greek verbs and their variations can be found here:

http://kalos-software.com/charts.php

along with other charts not relevant to this article.

All these accidents we mentioned for Greek verbs are called the "conjugation" of a verb.

To summarize, the conjugation of a verb (in both English, Spanish and Classic Greek) consists in how the verb word changes according to the following accidents:

  • Person
  • Number
  • Tense
  • Voice
  • Mood

In Greek, all these accidents are usually indicated in a single, usually long word. In Spanish, some accidents are indicated using different word endings and some are constructed using verbal phrases. In English, there is very little variation in verbal words, and almost all the verb's accidents are indicated using either an accompanying personal pronoun and/or verbal phrases.

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Friday, February 09, 2007

Hello, my name is Gonzalo.
Along with my wife Mariana we created a Classic Greek computer program called Kalós.
Recently, we changed our hosting company to hostmonster.com, and created a web site there whose url is http://www.kalos-software.com
The program can be downloaded for free, and it provides a free Greek/English/Spanish/French dictionary. It also contains a utility to find the canonical or "dictionary" form given an inflected form. And it is able to print several kinds of inflection charts (the full verb conjugation, the full declension for substantives, the inflection for participles, the declension and gender/number inflection for adjectives, etc.).
Right now it reached version 4.0.7.
People keep downloading it, sending suggestions and praise, and reporting occasional errors.
We are very proud of the software, although we would like it to generate some income. The problem is, we don't really "cripple" it. Once in a while, a nagging screen appears reminding the user to pay for it, but aside from that there is no way of forcing people to pay for it.
Another problem is our competition, the powerful "Perseus" software (now Hopper), a huge database of Greek texts created by Tufts University http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/
It also contains a morphological analysis tool, and its database is huge. Besides, it links all or most words of the Greek texts it contains to a few well known dictionaries, among them the very respectable Liddel-Scott, recognized as an authority by Classic Greek scholars.
On the plus side, Kalós is a downloadable program and it doesn't need an Internet connection once installed. The display capabilities of Perseus (how to display Greek letters, etc) are also somewhat lacking, and it suffers numerous server outages; Kalós doesn't.



یہ موسم ملنے کا ہے. This is the season to unite
پھولوں کے کھلنے کا ہے. For flowers to blossom
آ جا رے مورے سَیّاں. Come, my beloved!
آ جا رے مورے رسیا. Oh, come, my libertine!
آ جا. Come!